Tuesday, December 20, 2005

Foob Fallout

Last week I published one of my occasional snarky posts about the comic strip For Better or For Worse. As I presumptuously tend to do, I posted a message in the comments of the Comics Curmudgeon site to siphon off some of Josh’s fan base. I try not to abuse this privilege, but it’s a pretty reliable traffic generator. As a tongue-in-cheek joke, I lured them in using the promise of a picture of a “nearly naked April” who, if you don’t know, is the teenage daughter character in the strip.

The stunt succeeded beyond my wildest imagination. I got over 300 visitors in one day from that link, drowning out my normal readership which consists of about a dozen dedicated blog friends and a lot of Googlers™ looking for Angelina Jolie in a backless dress. You could practically sit there and watch the sitemeter spin.

The picture I was using as blog bait is on the April Paper Doll page, which is not nearly as tawdry as I made it out to be, which is of course part of my point. One of my regular readers, Mooselet, caught on to my unstated hint that this is not perhaps the most benign image to put into the hands of anybody that can use the right click menu of the browser. Ellcee also chimed in that it was perhaps naïve on the part of Foob Central to think that the world is not the happy safe place it ought to be.

I am certain some photoshopper somewhere has already airbrushed off April’s bra and panties for some hentai-style parody. And no, I do not want to know where I can find it. I have seen enough images of Belle or Ariel doing very un-Disney things to not want that image seared into my brain.

Even more amusing to me, as well as frightening for the general public, is that I sprinkled over two dozen links to various pages on the FBorFW website and the most clicked-on link was the one to “topless toddler April.” It’s that sort of prurient curiosity that makes you the target of FBI sting operations.

Of the nearly 500 visits I got over the three-day surge of traffic, I am most intrigued by the half dozen or so I got from Sudbury, Ontario. It seems I had drawn the attention of the Lynnions. I have no idea whether it was Stephanie Van Doleweerd, or Lynn herself, but someone at Foob Central took the trouble to check over my past foobish posts as well. Hopefully I have passed muster in my avoidance of any intellectual property infringements or bandwidth incursions (a hundred clicks from me is a drop in the bucket of their 500GB monthly traffic), and I can continue to make my gentle jabs in the future.

The biggest disappointment in my ratings sweep-week stunt was that I didn’t get any more comments than normal. I guess everyone was too red-faced to admit they had been suckered to own up and comment. And Steph (may I call you Steph?), If you swing by in the future (since I am now on your watch-list) and I have stepped over some boundary, leave me a comment and we can discuss it like civilized people by e-mail. No need to tap the lawyers’ retainer. I’m a reasonable person. Don’t worry about leaving the e-mail address; I’m sure I can find it.

Finally, if Josh could let me know how many visitors read the comments on December 12, we can calculate the click-through rate and figure out how lucrative links to underwear-clad underage comic strip characters could be. Let’s see, there is Luann, Paige Fox, Agnes, Nancy….

13 comments:

I recently added a counter to my site (hidden) because I was curious as to whether or not the number of comments (averaging around 15 or so per chapter) I was getting for To Love a Mountie was indicative of my actual readership (and worth the time and effort I was putting into getting the chapters out so quickly).

As it turns out, it wasn't -- I get something like 200+ unique hits per day, and averaged even more during the last few chapters of TLAM.

I get readers from all over the world, too, though most are from the US and Canada. Oddly, there has been no sign of Mt. Foob yet -- I'm so disappointed!

A lynnion came by at about 7:30 this morning, but didn't leave a comment. I guess that's a good thing, but I still feel snubbed. They missed this post by 15 minutes when they did their rounds on Tuesday.

Nearly Naked April is the type of picture Elly would think is "cute" and put it on a Christmas card..Then years later, Rebeccah would find it be accident, and then photocopy it, and put it all around school. Shannon would then get turned on, and the Foob sex as discused a joshreads.com would pursue.